387 incidents against staff

Ruth Laird, a non-Executive director of the Western Trust, raised the matter at the health authority’s January board meeting.

She pointed out that between September 1 and November 23 last year there had been 387 incidents against staff and that she believed that the Trust should be doing more to finance staff to take cases where they needed to.

Western Trust Chief Executive Neil Guckian pointed out that legislative change would be required to allow health authorities in the north to finance cases for staff with Ms. Laird pointing out that as things currently stand ‘if someone is grievously harmed and then they do not have financial support'.

Mr. Guckian said: “We are unique in NI compared to the UK. In all of the other jurisdictions of the UK the organisations can take a case on behalf of the individual but in NI the individual must take a personal case.”

Karen Hargan, Director of Human Resources and Organisation Development, pointed out that the Trust does take a number of practical steps to support staff short of supporting cases financially.

“It's important that we very quickly wrap around staff who are affected by the most significant aspects of violence and aggression because it takes many different forms and can happen to people at all different levels within this organisation,” she said.

Ms. Hargan said the types of services the Western Trust provides and the types of patient it supports means some incidents of this nature are a risk.

“The areas where these incidents of violence and aggression are highest are in mental health and primary care and older people's services although we focus a lot on Emergency Department sometimes and that is right as well.

"The nature of the work we do, does mean that staff are open to this. We do provide training. We do provide additional staffing where required but it’s also really important that when something significant happens we wrap around staff and that means a whole range of measures,” she said.

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Western Trust Chairman Dr. Tom Frawley said the board would raise the legislative impediment to financial support for staff.

"We can raise that. We would like to take our place amongst those jurisdictions that actually do support an individual,” he said.

Ms. Laird said she believed that there was ‘almost a moral duty’ to support health and social care staff in such cases.

Dr. Frawley concurred: “I don’t doubt that at all and it was brought home to me very powerfully on my visit to Grangewood [the Western Trust’s acute mental health inpatient unit at Gransha] in terms of the circumstances that persisted down there for an extended period, what a number of staff experienced in order, in fact, to fulfil our responsibility in terms of rehabilitation.

"Some of the injuries they experienced were absolutely dreadful and yet they turned up every day to continue doing it.”

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